She was in pain.
He could see it.
He could feel it. Which was odd, really, because feeling came as such a foreign concept to him. It had been a while since he had experienced anything of the like.
A long while.
She's just rare, he guessed, shrugging it off. It's because I lingered too long on her story.
He did not question why he had opted to observe her for so long. It did not occur to him to ask, for he preferred to dismiss the occurrence as simply an accident and not an intentional anomaly. He did not question, for he did not wish to know.
It was too dangerous.
Yet, the anguished cries of her suffering mind tugged at his attention, forcing him to turn back towards her.
She was crying.
Crying, he recognized. A reaction triggered by pain.
This, he understood. In his experience, he had seen his fair share of pain. Pain was usually all they knew before they came to meet him.
He had seen pain, but had never felt it as intensely as he did in that moment. Her sobs rang purely through his being, reverberating through the emptiness. He found himself paralyzed, aching, understanding her plight.
He thought he saw the wisps of hope before her flicker, shining weaker for a split second. Slightly wary, he dismissed it, although he knew the consequences if it continued. The hope would fizzle out, abandoning the one they tried to save. One who became an empty shell.
He knew because he had seen it too many times.
He did not want to see it again.
